It's alive!

A Halloween piece from 1997:

First, dump a can of cream of mushroom soup into a wide bowl.

Don’t let the moment escape you, now. Savor the giant sucking sound, then the slurping glop. And look, oh, look! It’s alive.

I had to work up my courage to perform the task, I admit. I bought the can early last summer, but I just couldn’t face disemboweling it. Indeed, I carted that darn can from Springfield to Austin, Texas, unwilling to throw it away, but too squeamish to perform the ugly operation.

My subconscious seems to have tried rather desperately to save me the trauma, too, for what would come welling up in my memory but my first dinner party? Was I hoping to forestall the moment of goop?

Let me take you back for a moment, back to the ‘70s again, alas. In spring of 1977, I invited a couple of fellow students to my digs at — I kid you not — the Yum Yum Apartments in Carrboro, N.C. Here was a good chance to do something other than what I was supposed to do — wallow in Latin and Greek, laughin’ and grief — and I threw myself into the task of providing an elegant meal to end all elegant meals. You really don’t want to know all the appalling details. The soup is enough.

I just had to serve vichyssoise (by the way, the final “s” is pronounced; please don’t end the word with an “ah” sound, for it upsets me). Unfortunately, the recipes I had called for chicken broth; I wasn’t about to use chicken broth, and I did not deviate from recipes back then. Heck, I’d never even tried to make soup from scratch. But lo! In the gourmet section of the supermarket, cans of potato soup with no poultry product listed on the label claimed the name vichyssoise, and I pounced.

I was an innocent. I might have saved the day with a little more guile, a little less What You See Is What You Get. Maybe if I’d seen to dressing up the stupid store-bought soup with a few herbs or spices, and serving it into nice bowls, with no confession of its base genealogy ... but maybe not.

True twit that I was, I took the darned cans directly from the fridge, opened them in plain sight of the two young men, at least one of whom I wanted to impress, and saw the grotesque mound that starchy canned soup is wont to make as I plopped it straight into individual bowls. Had I said aloud, “I am not a cook,” I — unlike Richard Nixon — would have been believed without question or hesitation. I stirred wildly, but my effort, such as it was, was wasted. Even had the stuff been particularly palatable — and it wasn’t — the monster from the can had doomed the dinner.

Cans can be our friends: We eat what we can, and what we can’t we can. Or something like that. You should still be very sparing about availing yourself of the convenience when you’re having serious company over, but with close friends or spouses, you can be a little looser. If you look to an inside page, I’ll give you a dinner for two (or three) based on what you can find in two cans.

Still, some things are to be banned from the kitchen: No canned spinach. Ever. The spouse occasionally buys canned green beans and collards, and I overlook them, but surely neither I nor you would make them part of a respectable menu. Or canned corn — gag me with a spoon. Frozen can be forgiven; canned cannot.

And a can of creamed mushroom — or chicken or celery — soup? You know you can make a stiff white sauce and season it highly, so if a recipe you just must make calls for canned cream soup, you can easily improvise. Starting to waver? Read the ingredients. And think of the glooping, shuddering, monstrous blob. Finally, this past week, three days before Halloween, I steeled myself to slice into the bloody can, and I watched it spill its great curdled globs of greasy, grimy, gopher guts. The horror. The horror.
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When I promised you a meal based on two cans, I didn’t mean two cans would be all you and your guest or two guests needed to get reasonably fed. Sheesh. Grow up. You’ll have to drag the pasta out of your cupboard, or freezer, and cook it, and I suggest you add some chopped tomatoes and/or some steamed green vegetables to the meal. And you should have a hunk of Parmesan cheese on hand, or Swiss, or something, not to mention garlic and the usual other stuff. Anyway, to save yourself from the cooking crunch at the last moment, take can No. 1 and make in advance your artichoke sauce (adapted from a recipe in “Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home”). As you get ready to roll, cook pasta, heat up a can of black beans (there’s can No. 2), chop tomatoes and, if you want, steam green vegetables. Reheat artichoke sauce and grate cheese. Serve.

Easy Artichoke Sauce
3 tablespoons of olive oil
3 tablespoons of unsalted butter
4 cloves garlic, smushed and minced (clove size? whatever fits your palate)
1 14-ounce can artichoke hearts, rinsed, drained and chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or other fresh herb (in a pinch, since this isn’t for fancy company, you can substitute 2 tablespoons of fresh parsley and 1 1/2 teaspoons of dried basil)
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat the oil and butter in a nonreactive saucepan. When the butter has melted, add the garlic and sauté for 2 or 3 minutes, until golden but not brown. Add the artichoke hearts, basil and lemon juice, and heat gently for about 10 minutes. Add black pepper to taste. Serve warm on, for example, cheese ravioli, spinach fettuccine or linguine, topped with grated cheese and chopped fresh tomatoes.

A raid on the inarticulate

A post of mine to the Copyediting List in October 1998:

Last February, in the middle of a standard battle between reporters and copy editors on the SPJ list, I threw out a remark to the effect of: "Come off it. Whether copy editors or reporters, most of us -- I include myself -- are at best mediocre, anyway." I think the word "slovenly" came into it. One veteran copy editor responded: Speak for yourself, Parker. And I answered thus:

I was just trying to be honest. If I live another 44 years and use them to good purpose, reading and writing far more, and more carefully, than I have thus far, I'll still consider myself no more than a trifler with my own tongue. Consider the following passage, from near the end of "East Coker" in T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres -
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Smugness and arrogance make bad writers and copy editors; the humble ones keep asking questions, learning and improving.

If we think we're the only salvation of the English language, it's in deep trouble.

Whipped

Here's one of my earliest efforts, from the fall of 1997.
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Miss Manners declares that certain sounds — OK, bathroom sounds — simply do not occur. If kitchen sounds fell in the same category, a favorite family tale would be ruined. The hissing and spitting and splatting of a can of whipped cream disgorging its goods is hard to mistake, or at least to make strike the ear as something more pleasant than it is. There is sort of a queasy inelegance about the whole operation. Sad, I suppose: I love canned whipped cream.

My father is wrong about the story, by the way. True, he was there, and I wasn’t, but his account of a dinner party he and my mother gave in the early ‘80s doesn’t make internal sense, and I am the one in the family cursed with the memory for utterly useless details. I remember it, I am sure, as my mother told it. If only she remembered it now ...

Anyway, the parental units invited over a poet/translator my father knew from work and the poet’s friend. At the dinner, my mother smiled brightly and asked the other woman present what she did. The horrifying response: She taught at a cooking school in Austin. Mother freaks out, of course, and, first sin of sins, overbroils the shrimp in beer: Real gourmets, as you know, demand a wiggle in their fishies, the cooking of which should approximate the amount of vermouth in a dry martini.

But the worst was yet to come. Cake was for dessert; a homemade cake, thank heavens, and not a tackily frosted cake, but a cake to be gussied up with a light and glorious cloud of cream. Yes, the cream was necessary, and, yes, my mother knew well how to whip it herself, but she had opted to save the trouble. She had made the cake, after all.

The kitchen in my parents’ post-nest house is right by the dining area, and the acoustics are bad — or good, however you look at it. There she was, lurking behind thin walls, trying to let out the puffs of whipped cream in short enough spurts to fall beneath the ears’ sensory capabilities. Spfffllt. SppFFFlTTT. Over and over. I wonder if my mother’s shudders were likewise audible.

(My father, I should say, believes my mother knew beforehand what Ann Clark, her guest, did for a living, and that her giving the dinner was a show of incredible, if reckless, valor. If so, valor indeed — I’d never have had the courage, and the cooking teacher said at the time that her profession rendered invitations a rarity. But if mother knew who she was, why didn’t she make the whipped cream? Father has no answer for that objection.)

In any case, my mother gave up giving dinner parties about that time. Dad says it’s a coincidence.
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As far as I know, Ann Clark wasn’t published in those days. I’d say “too bad” if I cared nothing for my mother’s feelings, for the fall of my mother’s jaw would have been all the more dramatic if she’d found herself facing a cookbook author. Thankfully, that happened later. Who knows: Maybe my mother’s efforts inspired Ms. Clark in some perverse way.

Ann Clark has published at least two cookbooks since. One, “Ann Clark's Fabulous Fish: Easy and Exciting Ways to Cook and Serve Seafood,” seems to be out of print. Not long ago I bought (new) her “Quick Cuisine: Easy and Elegant Recipes for Every Occasion,” Plume/Penguin, 1993/95. From that book I picked out two recipes of some relevance. First, shrimp, but not broiled -- that’s too easy to blow. And it’s mushed up anyway, so texture won’t be of the essence,

The second is a cake, but without whipped cream. Clark does have a recipe for one, a walnut and almond cake with cassis cream, Maybe some other time.

QUICK SHRIMP PATE (serves 6)

2 cups water
Pinch kosher salt (or regular, if you must, she says)
I pound medium shrimp in the shell
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon hot Hungarian paprika
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley or fresh dill, for garnish

Bring the water to a boil, add the salt, and cook the shrimp for about 3 minutes or until they curl. Drain, and plunge in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. When cool, peel.

Place the shrimp in a blender or food processor with the lemon juice and oil. Blend to a smooth paste, adding more oil if needed. Add the paprika, salt, and white pepper, and mix well. Spread the paste on the bottom of an 8 x 8-inch metal baking pan and chill in the refrigerator for 7 to 10 minutes, or in the freezer for 5 minutes. Serve, garnished with parsely.
NOTE: Unless the vein in shrimp is very large or dark, Clark generally does not devein shrimp.
MAKE AHEAD: up to 24 hours; store in a covered crock or jar in the refrigerator.

ESPRESSO CAKE (serves 6 to 8)

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup plus one tablespoon sugar
2 large eggs
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
7 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/2 tablespoons instant espresso powder
1 1/2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons brewed espresso coffee

MOCHA ICING

2 ounces bittersweet chocolate
2 tablespoons brewed espresso

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. With a mixer, cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Sift the flour, cornstarch, instant espresso, and baking powder together. Add to the egg mixture, and blend well. Add the espresso coffee.

Butter and flour an 8-inch square or round baking pan. Pour in the batter, and bake for 30 minutes, or until cake springs back when pressed. Remove the cake from the pan and cool on a wire rack.

When the cake is cool, make the icing: Melt the chocolate in the coffee in a double boiler. Stir to mix well. Pour the warm icing over the cooled cake.

NOTE: Although espresso gives the best flavor here, you can use any double-strength dark-roast coffee instead.

MAKE AHEAD: up to 48 hours: refrigerate, covered; or freeze for 3 months, with or without icing; to thaw, leave at room temperature for 3 hours.

Ratatatat

When I wrote this column in August 2001, the advertising department of my newspaper was outraged. That surprised the hell out of me: I'd meant to outrage the reporters just as much. Oh well.
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Civilization as I knew it was nearly blown apart by popcorn.

Who really thinks food is a force for good? Granted, in prehistoric times -- or so the scholars tell us -- hunger bred cooperation: Heroic hunters strode forth and slew the ill-starred woolly mammoth, hacked away manfully at its massive carcass, and dragged all they could carry home to the grateful clan.

But when, at the dawn of the 21st century, the great popcorn behemoth willingly spills its guts in the company cola room, life at the ... grows nastier and more brutish.

Your trusty daily newspaper, sad to say, is riven by serious social divisions. In one corner, you have the prosperous day-siders, with their well-coiffed tresses, sleek suits, shiny shoes and assigned parking spaces. Then there are those of us who labor by night, too often clad in the ratty and the recycled, hungry at every turn, and likewise angry and snarling.

Yet the two classes aren't quite as divergent on Fridays: The so-called communal popper makes our upper class shed much of its thin veneer. When the less favored among us stagger in after a gruelling, desperate search for a place to put our ancient and bedraggled vehicles, we see the unmistakable signs of the day-siders' animal frenzy: the greasy tracks, the sad shards of popcorn kernels, trailing here and yon across the hallowed newspaper's otherwise sanitary halls.

Night-siders trudge upstairs to the break room to see a popcorn desert, all kernels of civilization now wiped away. Grrrr.

I'll admit it — I can be a professional malcontent. Every week, I sowed seeds of revolution among my peers with three simple words: "Out of popcorn"; I buttered the night-siders up with an image of the new popcorn age to come under my brilliant leadership, and they oozed gratitude and awe.

'We needed a giant showdown, but how? I liked the idea of sneaking in early with a large paper bag and, while no one was there to witness, looting all I could for the cause. But "while no one was there"? As if! — those vultures circled constantly.

So, Plan B: Try blackmail. I slithered up the stairs for some subtle reconnaissance in the Friday midafternoon. A gaggle of well-groomed women circled the popcorn altar, with crammed, overspilling cornucopiae in hand. Pretending to study the contents of a soft-drink machine, I aimed my quivering ears outward, ready to pick up any damning statements that I could quote against them.

Curses! Foiled again! The only clear sound I picked up was a resolute munch, crunch, chomp. Then all of a sudden the group scattered, and the plundered popper came into full view. Wait! It wasn't quite empty. I gathered up one of the pathetic paper cones still remaining and started scraping away at the faux-yellow remnants inside.

I'd come, I'd seen, and I was ready to start snarfing. Mindful only of that, I danced down to my desk with my trove of kernels, kernels that perhaps had seen better hours, but ones I could still sniff happily; I could still glory in my prey and in its inevitable surrrender. And then I looked up. Right there, staring at me with a bristling sense of betrayal, were the righteous and rabid have-nots of the night-side copy desk. Through the grim silence, I could hear their thoughts — I was a popcorn quisling.

But as my nose and my gaze was drawn back to my prey, I could feel the world well lost. I buried my face in popcorn and gave myself up to private ecstasy.

Peter Parisi: "Liberal Arts and Journalism"

Parisi, Peter. "Critical Studies, the Liberal Arts, and Journalism Education." Journalism Educator, Winter 1992, Vol. 46 Issue 4, pp. 4-13. pp. 5-7:

Liberal arts and journalism

The liberal arts are fundamentally and persistently critical. Liberal arts study may indeed have responded historically to vocational opportunities,(2) but the liberal arts college insofar as it deserves the name does not "train" but "educates." It remains centrally "an institution created for the critical examination by professional minds of tenets, principles, laws, dogmas, and ideas that make up the ever varying body of truth" (Jones, 1967).

Liberal arts education "preserves truth by perpetually subjecting conventional assumptions to critical analysis, discarding fallacies, and retaining as valid only the information or the general statements that pass severe, impersonal, and professional testing, and it extends truth by pushing forward, into the unknown, task forces of professionally trained persons who are skilled in distinguishing fact from assumption" (p. 15).

Some journalism educators would contend that journalism and journalism education fulfill this spirit just as they are. Mencher (1990) defended the liberal arts values embodied in journalism by pointing to key critical qualities: "the premise that a rational, independent approach to problems will turn up useful, sometimes essential information," " a scientific approach—objectivity of observation, verifiability, exactness of description," "demand[ing] proof of assertion," and freedom "from the bonds of bias and unreasoned conviction" [p. 66]. Journalism, Mencher says, is "the university's center of Enlightenment values, the focus of a truly liberal education" (p. 66; see also Merrill, 1962; Wilcox, 1959; Higginbotham, 1961).

But at the same time, journalism educators are not entirely comfortable with the critical spirit. Would it create Hamlet-reporters, so sensitive that they cannot write? Lance (1961) worried that "the heady perfume of aesthetics" might "cripple the student's news sense" (p. 87). And Meyer (1986) described a student answering an ethics question, so freighted with virtue he couldn't see any way to write a story.

In an important sense, journalism does not "critically examine tenets, principles, laws and dogmas." Tuchman (1978) notes that "dependence upon accepted understandings of the social world [is] intrinsic to news" (p. 88). Journalism posits events as "understandable in themselves" (Benjamin, 1969, p. 89), and for the same reason has been called "empiricism without science" (Nord, 1990, p. 26).

Journalists may pride themselves on criticizing public officials, but the standards of criticism must be based narrowly on existing law and regulation. And journalism is notoriously uncritical of the larger framework of this very law or the context of social problems. Journalistic writing achieves the appearance of objectivity precisely by pruning away context, by fragmenting events and framing them within terms that can achieve immediate public assent. Tenets, principles, and laws are hard to fit in a news story.

Journalists make it their social role to suppress personal opinion in order to mediate between sources and the public. They are to be objective, or, if that seems too pretentious, impartial and balanced. They "get sources from both sides." They define events by asking questions about measurable facts (the five W's and H); they gather information most often, not through their critical assessment of published literature, but through personal interviews with sources (and "a reporter is only as good as his or her sources").

Finally as Tuchman and others have shown, journalists do not really claim to find the truth but only to state the fact that Source A made Statement X (though this caution does not prevent codes of ethics and rhetorical fervor in which journalists proclaim their dedication to the pursuit to an apparently uncomplicated truth.)

Journalistic method entails a partial neutralization of the intellect in the name of public discussion. As Sandman said, "The reporter makes a principled decision not to think" (1988; see also Sandman, 1986). This formulation isolates the social value, the principle, that motivates journalists, but at the same times reveals the nub of the contradiction between traditional journalism education and the liberal arts. Journalism education that uncritically inculcates the objective method is, in a significant sense, an education in how "not to think."

True, most journalism educators urge students to put facts in context, but it is relatively rare that the journalism curriculum examines the dimensions and limits of journalism as a rhetorical method of examining social experience.

The problem is compounded when we reflect that the theory of knowledge that underlies journalistic objectivity ignores the most important currents in contemporary thought. In journalism, the gathering and description of "truth" is straightforward and, philosophically if not practically, unproblematic. Journalism treats facts as simple things. But as Tuchman (1978) points out:

"taken by itself, a fact has no meaning. Indeed, even 'two and two equal four' is factual only within certain mathematical systems or theories. It is the imposition of a frame of other ordered facts that enables recognition of and attribution of meaning (p. 88)."

This view reflects the most significant contemporary developments in anthropology, philosophy (including philosophy of science), literary theory, sociology, and other disciplines. Truth is not "found" but is defined by the very methodologies, languages, technologies, cultural assumptions, economic imperatives, and literary systems through which it is sought and represented. For liberal study, facts, knowledge and the truth are not "out there" but are socially constructed.(3)

Forms of writing and interpretation, such as journalism, are seen to take shape within a specific social (as opposed to institutional) history. Thus Schudson (1978) can show how objectivity itself "became an ideal in journalism ... precisely when the impossibility of overcoming subjectivity had come to be regarded as inevitable" (p. 157). It is because journalism and journalism education so systematically ignore this truly critically understanding that Birkhead (1985) observes:

"handling news is not a way of exploring and reporting the world that stands on its own merits as an epistemological method. In the university setting, it often demands less creativity and aptitude than other forms of observation, research, judgment and expression that may be demanded of students during their academic careers. Many journalism departments operate in intellectual isolation, closer in spirit to the media they serve from a distance than to the university community within which they reside (p. 35; see also Birkhead, 1986)."

Since journalism education ignores its own larger historical and cultural dimensions, it cannot coherently reinforce the liberal arts curriculum.

(2) As Nash (1944) points out, even the most classical liberal arts subjects arose in a vocational context: "a liberal arts course based on the synoptic study of classical culture provided the vocational training of future leaders in Church and State" (p. 399). Higginbotham (1961) and Merrill (1962) make the same point to deflect criticism of journalism vocationalism (see also, McCall, 1987; Jones, 1986).

(3) Providing references for this observation requires almost a course in the intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. The following selected works may serve, however, to suggest ways in which conditions of the act of knowing are recognized to govern what is known: Kant (1929 [1781]); Freud (1953 [1924]); Cassirer (1970; Mannheim (1936); Heisenberg (1958); Berger and Luckmann (1966); Foucault (1972).